well i'm john harbin in washington d.c. here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture he has an extraordinary resume author pastor former congressman and c.e.o. of the nonprofit organization common cause bob edgar joins me tonight for conversations with great minds discuss his time in office the issues he's now taking on the war of peace and the corruption of the supreme court by any means necessary that's exactly what the republican party is doing to get their way and that includes using hostage taking tactics whole debate that and more infamous

rumble last romney campaign contributions appearing out of thin air it's not a mormon miracle and it should be illegal but according to the supreme court it's perfectly legal if it comes from a faceless corporation. and it's daily take. presides conversations of the great minds i'm joined by a policy voice in america dr bob edgar a former congressman from pennsylvania who served six terms in the u.s. house of representatives and a master's degree in divinity from the illogical school during the first year as well as five honorary doctoral degrees he's going to learn his insight and talents to a number of organizations across america from families usa to the national coalition on health care at the center for international policy to name just a few currently he's the c.e.o. of common cause a nonprofit. as an organization working to strengthen our democracy and make our

government more palatable to the people he's also author of the book middle church reclaiming the moral values of the faithful majority from the religious right pleased to welcome here in studio is dr bob edgar welcome it's great to be with you great to have you with us you served as the democratic representative one of them from pennsylvania that's a very recent congress i'm curious what got you into politics and what advice you would have for today's politicians october twentieth one nine hundred seventy three richard nixon fired archibald cox who was the special prosecutor looking into watergate i looked the word democratic up in the telephone book and i moved in one year from being vice chairman of my son's parent teacher's organization to getting elected to the united states congress as one of the watergate babies at age thirty one i had never been to a political meeting before archibald cox was fired i had no experience in politics i was an urban pastor in philadelphia and i was

a chaplain at drexel university and i got mad at the fact that my elected official who was good buddies with richard nixon just assumed he would get reelected automatically in fact no democrat had won an election in my district since eight hundred fifty eight the district had two hundred ten thousand republicans ninety thousand democrats i asked around the people and who are you planning to run for congress and they said well we'll probably look for a lawyer need some publicity and expect him to lose i wasn't satisfied with that so i ran and won and the miracle wasn't the first election that was watergate ehrlichman halderman john dean and richard nixon the real miracle was i got reelected five additional times and voluntarily left the congress by running against arlen specter for the united states senate in one nine hundred eighty six i came in second i got the silver medal for the senate and decided i wasn't going to spend the rest of my life. trying to get reelected to some office i spent

a few years running the committee for national security and i spent ten years as president of the graduate school in california i spent seven and a half years as general secretary of the national council of churches and then about four years ago i came to be president of common cause a great organization that's been around for forty one years founded it frankly by moderate republicans who felt everybody had special interest and in washington except average ordinary people john gardner was the founder who had worked in the johnson administration and my job over the last four years is to try to recalibrate common cause to be the people's lobby to hold power accountable and to confront the issues in some new ways you've you've worked on a variety of issues in a variety of incarnations in your life you were also a pastor. i was a minister of an island church at age nineteen i went off to lycoming college and

williamsport to get my education would support pennsylvania and my parents had no money and my father was an assembly line worker at general electric and about halfway through my freshman year he indicated there was no resource for a second year so i called the. bishop on the phone and discovered that the methodist church had churches that they gave to regular ministers and retired ministers and seminary students but they had churches left over so colleague of mine. in our freshman year were appointed to a church i was two weeks nineteen when i arrived at the gilbert united methodist church in gilberton pennsylvania it's a small coal mining town the gilbert hold company was pretty infamous in pennsylvania for doing bad things to the environment and the people of that congregation taught me a lot mission thought i did so well the first year he gave me two churches the next year on a search. near harrisburg i served churches for six years before i graduated from

seminary and twelve years before i got elected to the united states congress what was your biggest lesson from that time. i think the biggest lesson actually happened around the corner from where this studio is in february of one nine hundred sixty eight i was invited by the chaplain at yale dr the name of reverend bill kaufman to come down to washington and make a connection between the war in vietnam and poverty and he had a host of people at new york avenue presbyterian church just here in washington and the keynote speaker was the young clergy person by the name of dr martin luther king this is five weeks before dr king was assassinated and he so empowered me and inspired me that i dedicated myself to be an urban pastor followed his life and was devastated at his assassination and i'm one of the few people in fact i was one

of twelve members of the house of representatives on the select committee on assassinations looking into both the death of john f. kennedy and dr martin luther king i interviewed james earl ray the assassin and like the dreamer better dr king said you and i will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of bad people but for the appalling silence of good people in my life it's been a series my vocation while being a person of faith and my vocation is basically to be a person who addresses ending the poverty that kills healing the earth and bringing peace and throughout my career i've been focused on all three of those major tasks and i joke and say i can retire when we end poverty. had peace and heal the earth. it's extraordinary you also went to vietnam to look at the situation. you know we we not only explicitly in overtly killed two million

vietnamese an. estimated two million but we left behind a horrible legacy. in inflicted on american troops got a fair amount of publicity agent orange but not so much but it was the ago the impact was that of the. whole spirit that surrounds and what brought you to the first let me say in april one thousand nine hundred seventy five i was one of the congressmen on the house floor shutting down the vietnam war the watergate baby class and one thousand nine hundred four that got elected was the first large class of congressman able to shut down the war many democrats from pennsylvania didn't think i'd last very long so they put this anti-war activist on the veterans affairs committee and in the late seventy's i chaired the committee that did the research on agent orange the impact on our veterans about a year and a half ago the ford foundation found out that i had worked early in the late

seventy's early eighty's helping our veterans get compensation for exposure to defoliate dioxin agent orange but they invited me to take a delegation the last may year ago may to vietnam. to look at the impact thirty five years after the war now thirty six years and i have taken two delegations one of religious leaders and run of secular leaders first a visit with the children and grandchildren of the vietnamese who are still being impacted by the chemicals that we used to defoliate. and come back passionate working with both the ford foundation and the aspen institute a u.s. vietnamese dialogue project to try to raise thirty million dollars a year for ten years in a row to clean up the hotspots in vietnam where the dioxin is still killing and maiming. children and families in vietnam and set up some health facilities in

vietnam but my passion is to remind americans that wars aren't over when the last soldier leaves the battlefield they were going to have similar problems in afghanistan and iraq given the chemicals that were used the unexploded munitions the land mines and so the the dippers pleated are iranian as well and i think vietnam is a good case for us there at a country that loves us which is really startling they're very frightened of china they want to increase trade with the united states they're an emerging economy travel and tourism is going to increase in that in that part of the world and with a little investment over a short period of time we can show the world that in fact you can go back in and clean up what was left as a legacy of the vietnam war so there are still hot spots in vietnam of the denying

airport is a good example it was the busiest airport in the world during the vietnam war were troops were being brought in and where the chemical was brought in and the chemical dioxin was five times powerful than it should have been and many of our veterans were using the barrels that the chemical came in to cook food and they were rinsing them out and using them as washing masons many of them came home with all kinds of diseases you can stand on the tarmac in an airport and you can actually smell the residual effects of the dioxin in the soil today today and we've been working hard to teach americans about that and there's a great partnership now vietnam and america work together to find the missing in action not just our missing in action but they're missing in action and now that that issue has. worked out between the two governments we think working between the

two governments to clean up the agent orange dioxin problem will be another way to bind our relationship and also witness to the rest of the world that wars are terrible and inflict terrible pain long after the battlefield when i was general secretary of the national council of churches in december of zero two i took a religious delegation to baghdad before the war and this was a time of doing a humanitarian inspection and we even saw there before this latest involvement in iraq in iraq we saw the residual effects of the first iraqi war still impacting on children there in iraq three years of sanctions and so actually many as a half a million children died as a result of those sanctions over the over the sanctions kept out equipment to repair incubators for babies because those parts could be used for get out storing

their they couldn't they couldn't make their water clean because it could be used to make chemical weapons unfortunately most americans don't realize when you put sanctions on a country what kind of impact that has that it doesn't just have an impact on the politicians or in iraq's case saddam hussein it has an impact on the children of that community. a very real and lasting we're talking with bob edgar our conversations with great minds we'll have more in just a moment. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right.

i think. he'd done it well. we never got the book says they're going to keep you safe get ready because of their freedom. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything is ok you don't i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

walk about your conversations with great minds and i'm joined by dr bob iger the c.e.o. of common cause and the author of the book middle church reclaiming the moral values of the faithful majority from the religious right now you were arrested here last week and i want to get to that but first what is the middle church. when i

was general secretary of the national council of churches i was frustrated with people like pat robertson and other conservatives pat robertson was calling for the assassination of the president of the as a whale and they were making outrageous statements so a number of people were jimmy carter was jim wallace of sojourners was right. former senator there was an episcopal priest jack danforth and i all four of us wrote books that were very similar pushing back on the religious right and in my case that look middle church reclaiming the moral values of the faithful majority was pointing out that what the left hasn't done very well is evangelize the middle and if you put the religious spectrum alongside the political spectrum they're very similar those that think about the political right if you look under them you'll see the religious right and so i want to speak a word of voice to middle america middle church middle synagogue middle mosque many

of whom have lost memory about the leadership of dr martin luther king and the plaques and whites and others that work so hard just fifty years ago to bring us the voting rights act the civil rights legislation. to to move away from segregation and i want to try to recapture the urgency of now that dr king talked about so i wrote a book that has become a neighborhood best seller my children a black coffee but it is a book that is trying to remind average ordinary citizens that they're going to take ownership of being the leaders that they that we've been waiting for i served in congress and i discovered after twelve years i loved being in congress in those days there was much more collaboration between democrats and republicans after election much more divisions by ideology the. by party affiliation it was

a great experience for me but i learned that congress often follows it doesn't lead and if we're really going to have a resurgence of democracy if we're going to have a resurgence of caring about the least of these our brothers and sisters average ordinary people are going to have to take back the agenda and you see this in the polling data where the polls say people are here but the politicians are way back here and even in this last debate on the debt crisis we sell time and time again people holding up charts talking about numbers and figures but failing to see the children who are going to be hurt because food programs are going to be cut or senior citizens that we're going to be cut well and that's that's the essence i mean we we have these conservative politicians or who embrace the religious right or of religion and we've the flags of the united states and christianity simultaneously and yet you just quoted from matthew twenty five it's the it's the

core essence of christianity was the one time in the bible when the disciples came to jesus said how do we get into heaven you know feed the poor heal the sick if you visit those in prison tom one of the things you should know him in the book i wrote every time i use the religious right i always put the radical religious right or the conservative right there are a number of evangelicals who have read the bible literally enough to discover god cares about poor people and there are a number of evangelicals who have been heroes of mine who have discovered god cares about all of planet earth and once to be stewards of the fragile planet and that voice is very weak now the major denominations are so busy putting themselves together that they are failing really to stand up and speak out with with a moral voice so what we did last week and they returned the capital was simply get eleven religious leaders to say you know we're not for the senate or the house position we're not for the repub. look into the democratic position we're here

simply on behalf of average ordinary citizens the real people who are hurting because of high levels of unemployment underemployment the challenges for children and the elderly today hubert humphrey said the moral test of government is what we do for those in the dawn of life our children those in the twilight of life the elderly and all of those in the shadows of life the poor the sick of the disabled the group that gathered was very interesting we gathered we prayed we were arrested we did a faithful act of civil disobedience and i have gotten many many e-mails from people including just an e-mail from someone who in one nine hundred sixty five during selma got arrested in the rotunda of the capitol praying and doing exactly the same thing and it's that that courageous remnant of people that have actually changed the world and we've got to reignite that spirit and help people in the mainline

churches and protestant catholic jewish and muslim traditions and other faith traditions to join hands and work together and really push back on some particularly the christian right that tends to say outrageous things that no one can find in the in the text of the bible. they're going to judge jeremiah. you know god being human beings the ability to write the scripture but it seems to me that faithful jews faithful muslims faithful christians understand in all of those traditions that god loves the least and the poorest and the last and calls us to be part of healing the planet which is also a student here that's right. and it was the inciting incident for your arrest in the rotunda of the. so-called crisis. exactly when the

president came on the air and spoke and they enter spoke after. a group of our staff got together and said what role should we be playing and we had just listened to a really courageous individual by the name of john raines former faculty member at temple one of the freedom riders he came to speak to the common cause staff and he really inspired us he talked about his days of getting on a bus as a white graduate student aged twenty seven going down to arkansas fifty years ago getting arrested. and he reminded us that he had just been reinvited arc and so he was brought in as a hero fifty years later he was honored for his presence and it just inspired the staff to say what can we do to visualize or middle america the fact that the cuts that are going to be made are going to have

a deep impact and we need balance we need people to pay their fair share of taxes we need the corporations to pay their fair share. bill moyers was helpful also in inspiring us he he said this is the most dangerous moment in american history we're either going to be a nation of and by and for the people who are of and by and for corporations and that i think was part of a motivating force to get us started and i have to tell you that there are going to roll out demonstrations like we did at the capitol all across the country in august and september as different faith groups have prayer ins and sit ins and other opportunities in congressional districts and when the twelve are named in the super committee this could be a lot of attention put on them common cause working with some other good government groups each of those twelve to pledge that they won't be raising money from the day

they're appointed. the day they come out with their report from special interest groups and secondly that they would be fully transparent on the corporate leaders the lobbyists. all of the special interests that they meet with but that will be completely open and we are hoping that faith leaders across the country will go into their states into their districts into their regions with this message on behalf of the the poor the children all of those who are being left out of the conversation our fear is that the twelve that will be named will in fact be inundated with corporate and labor special interests and not really speak on behalf of all of the people of the nation we need a fair result coming out of this assuming that there's any reason assuming that. you know this theme of morality. not of not sanctimonious reality but genuine

reality has been running through this conversation another dimension of this that you've worked on is the issue of morality among denying kings of america the people who since eighteen zero three with the marbury case actually have more power than the other two branches of government clearly not what the founders intended but they have it and they have declared themselves above the law essentially above certainly the judicial code of conduct we're talking with the supreme court. the constitution article three the constitution that defines the supreme court says that they shall act. within the regulations. or i can't find it but it's somewhere in my notes here but i read it. the regulations defined by congress the congress shall regulate the supreme court. with the abuses of particularly thomas and scalia that particular grievous ones deciding cases after having you going to school you example thomas and the way

the koch brothers. cover that morality for the supreme court if congress is unwilling to assert the power of the constitution. most legal scholars say the only way you can get out the supreme court is to shine the light of media attention and raise issues with the supreme court and common cause got into this by accident we wanted to target some of the corporate leaders who were moving us in the wrong direction and we discovered that charles and david koch the koch brothers twice a year get corporate leaders together at spas and they bring in political commentators they bring in legislators to move our nation not towards a corporate agenda as opposed to the people's agenda they bragged last september in their invitation that they had spilled the zero seven and thomas in zero eight at

their at their meetings so some of my staff went and started to investigate discovered that in fact scalia and thomas did attend their meetings and so we sent a letter to the justice department said. is that a conflict of interest because. in zero nine they did an extraordinary thing they held over the citizens united case which gives corporations and labor unions the ability to use corporate treasury money for the first time. were they tainted in their visits at the koch brothers events and as a part of that we asked the justice department to investigate and we then found out that thomas had for the six years that we could see had filled out his financial statement wrong so we sent a letter to the judicial conference asking them to investigate and then forty eight hours thomas was redoing twenty one years of his financial statements where he

had marked on a box saying no is white had no outside income and yet his wife ginni thomas had been known to have worked for a variety of organizations but that's not the end of it it was like six hundred thousand dollars range common causes discovered that the supreme court has exempted itself from the code of ethics that all other federal judges have been. obliged to abide by and so what we're asking is justice roberts to tell us what ethical code does the supreme court operate under and if a supreme court justice violates that or has a conflict of interest what are the principles that you used to to check on conflict of interest and we were very surprised at what we found and so we're continuing to put light on to both justice thomas and scalia in terms of their political involvement for example has met several times with the tea party went up

to capitol hill in late january to them by michele bachmann if you read the judicial code of ethics giving money to political parties speaking at the. little of bents is all forbid by federal judges but the supreme court seems to feel it's of that responsibility we want to shine a light on the supreme court and make them hold the highest court in the land should have the lowest ethical standards if they should be the rivers thanks so much for this race to be with you great to have this. coming up our big picture rubble joining me in the rubble are heather servo joe joe madison and brian darling suppose the stock market crash the recent g.o.p. hostage takeovers and fox so-called news defending erections but not contraception right after the break.